.. Smalls, tall, athletic and affable with a closely cropped beard, says he has learned from the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union’s loss in Alabama. “The fact that we’ve seen what Amazon does gives us an advantage,” Smalls said. “And we learned from the union’s missed opportunities. We’re not going to make their mistakes.” Smalls promises to have a bigger, stronger workers’ committee to educate and mobilize workers to support his Amazon Labor Union.

This isn’t the first time Smalls has crossed swords with Amazon. Convinced that Amazon wasn’t doing nearly enough to protect workers from Covid-19, whether on personal protection equipment or social distancing, Smalls – then an assistant manager at the Staten Island warehouse – led a walkout in March 2020. Amazon fired him that day, saying he had violated social distancing rules. The New York state attorney general, Letitia James, has accused Amazon of unlawfully firing Smalls for speaking out on safety issues.

Several days after Smalls was fired, Amazon’s general counsel mapped out a plan – at a meeting that Jeff Bezos attended – to smear Smalls as “not smart or articulate” and to make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement”. “They said they’d make me the whole face of the union effort against Amazon,” Smalls told the Guardian. “I’m trying to make them eat their words.” Smalls, who is African American, said the general counsel’s plan “was definitely racist”. The general counsel said he didn’t know Smalls was Black, but Smalls doesn’t believe him.
Explaining his decision to create a new union, Smalls said: “If established unions had been effective, they would have unionized Amazon already. We have to think about 21st century-style unionizing. It’s how do we build up the workers’ solidarity...